Miracle in the Andes Read online

  Susy groaned softly and shifted in my arms. “Don’t worry,” I whispered to her, “they will find us. They will bring us home.” Whether I believed those words or not, I can’t say. My only thought now was to comfort my sister. The sun was setting, and as the light in the fuselage dimmed, the frigid air took on an even sharper edge. The others, who had already lived through two long nights in the mountains, found their sleeping places and braced for the misery they knew lay ahead. Soon the darkness in the plane was absolute, and the cold closed on us like the jaws of a vise. The ferocity of the cold stole my breath away. It seemed to have a malice in it, a predatory will, but there was no way to fight off its attack except to huddle closer to my sister. Time itself seemed to have frozen solid. I lay on the cold floor of the fuselage, tormented by the icy gusts blowing in through every gap and crack, shivering uncontrollably for what seemed like hours, certain that dawn must be only moments away. Then someone with an illuminated watch would announce the time and I would realize that only minutes had passed. I suffered through the long night breath by frozen breath, from one shivering heartbeat to the next, and each moment was its own separate hell. When I thought I couldn’t stand it any longer, I would draw Susy closer, and the thought that I was comforting her kept me sane. In the darkness, I couldn’t see Susy’s face; I could only hear her labored breathing. As I lay beside her, the sweetness of my love for her, for my lost friends and my family, for the suddenly fragile notion of my own life and future, swelled in my heart with an ache so profound it sapped all my strength, and for a moment I thought I would pass out. But I steadied myself and eased closer to Susy, wrapping my arms around her as gently as I could, mindful of her injuries and fighting the urge to squeeze her with all my might. I pressed my cheek against hers so I could feel her warm breath on my face, and held her that way all night, gently, but very close, never letting go, embracing her as if I were embracing all the love and peace and joy I had ever known and would ever know; as if by holding on tight I could keep everything precious from slipping away.

  Chapter Three

  A Promise

  I SLEPT VERY LITTLE that first night out of the coma, and as I lay awake in the frigid darkness, it seemed that dawn would never come. But at last a thin light slowly brightened the windows of the fuselage, and the others began to stir. My heart sank when I first saw them—their hair, eyebrows, and lips glistened with thick silver frost, and they moved stiffly and slowly, like old men. As I began to rise, I realized that my clothes had frozen stiff on my body, and frost had clumped on my brows and lashes. I forced myself to stand. The pain inside my skull still throbbed, but the bleeding had stopped, so I staggered outside the fuselage to take my first look at the strange white world into which we had fallen.

  The morning sun lit the snow-covered slopes with a hard white glare, and I had to squint as I surveyed the landscape surrounding the crash site. The Fairchild’s battered fuselage had come to rest on a snow-packed glacier flowing down the eastern slope of a massive, ice-crusted mountain. The plane sat with its crumpled nose pointing slightly down the mountainside. The glacier itself plunged down the mountain, then streamed off into a broad valley that wound for miles through the cordillera until it disappeared into a maze of snow-capped ridges marching off to the eastern horizon. East was the only direction in which we could see for any great distance. To the north, south, and west, the view was blocked by a stand of towering mountains. We knew we were high in the Andes, but the snowy slopes above us rose up even higher, so that I had to tilt my head back on my shoulders to see their summits. At the very top, the mountains broke through the snow cover in black peaks shaped like crude pyramids, colossal tents, or huge, broken molars. The ridges formed a ragged semicircle that ringed the crash site like the walls of a monstrous amphitheater, with the wreckage of the Fairchild lying at center stage.

  As I surveyed our new world, I was so baffled by the dreamlike strangeness of the place that at first I struggled to convince myself it was real. The mountains were so huge, so pure and silent, and so profoundly removed from the reach of anything in my experience, that I simply could not find my bearings. I had lived all my life in Montevideo, a city of one and a half million people, and had never even considered the fact that cities are manufactured things, built with scales and frames of reference that had been designed to suit the uses and sensibilities of human beings. But the Andes had been thrust up from the earth’s crust millions of years before human beings ever walked the planet. Nothing in this place welcomed human life, or even acknowledged its existence. The cold tormented us. The thin air starved our lungs. The unfiltered sun blinded us and blistered our lips and skin, and the snow was so deep that once the morning sun had melted the icy crust that formed on its surface each night, we could not venture far from the plane without sinking to our hips in the drifts. And in all the endless miles of frozen slopes and valleys that entrapped us, there was nothing that any living creature could use as food—not a bird, not an insect, not a single blade of grass. Our chances of survival would have been better if we’d been stranded in the open ocean, or lost in the Sahara. At least some sort of life survives in those places. During the cold months in the high Andes, there is no life at all. We were absurdly out of place here, like a seahorse in the desert, or a flower on the moon. A dread began to form in my mind, an unformed thought that I was not yet able to verbalize: Life is an anomaly here, and the mountains will tolerate that anomaly for only so long.

  From my very first hours in the mountains, I felt, deep in my bones, the immediacy of the danger that surrounded us. There was never a moment I did not feel the realness and closeness of death, and never a moment in which I was not gripped by primal fear. Still, as I stood outside the Fairchild, I could not help myself from being swept away by the awesome grandeur all around us. There was incredible beauty here—in the hugeness and power of the mountains, in the windswept snowfields that glowed so perfectly white, and in the astounding beauty of the Andean sky. As I looked up now, the sky was cloudless, and it crackled with an iridescent shade of cold, deep blue. Its eerie beauty left me awestruck, but like everything else here, the vastness and emptiness of that endless sky made me feel small and lost and impossibly far from home. In this primeval world, with its crushing scale, its lifeless beauty and its strange silence, I felt awkwardly out of joint with reality in the most fundamental sense, and that scared me more than anything, because I knew in my gut that our survival here would depend on our ability to react to challenges and catastrophes we could not now even imagine. We were playing a game against an unknown and unforgiving opponent. The stakes were terrible—play well or die—but we didn’t even know the ground rules. I knew that in order to save my life I would have to understand those rules, but the cold white world around me was offering up no clues.

  In those early days of the ordeal, I might have felt more grounded in my new reality if I remembered more of the crash. Because I’d blacked out in the earliest stages of the accident, I had no recollection of anything until I came to my senses three days later. But most of the other survivors had been conscious for every second of the disaster, and as they recounted the details of the crash, and the desperate days that followed, I realized it was a miracle that any of us were alive.

  I remembered the flight through Planchón Pass, where we traveled in cloud cover so heavy that visibility was nearly zero and the pilots were forced to fly on instruments. Severe turbulence was tossing the plane around, and at one point we hit an air pocket that forced the plane to drop several hundred feet. This rapid descent dropped us below the clouds, and that was probably the moment when the pilots first saw the black ridge rising dead ahead. Immediately they gunned the Fairchild’s engines in a desperate effort to climb. This effort managed to raise the plane’s nose a few degrees—preventing a head-on collision with the ridge, which, at a cruising speed of 230 miles per hour, would have reduced the Fairchild to shreds—but their actions were too late to lift the plane completely over the
mountain. The Fairchild’s belly slammed into the ridge at roughly the point where the wings met the body, and the damage was catastrophic. First the wings broke away. The right wing spiraled down into the pass. The left wing slammed back against the plane, where its propeller sliced through the Fairchild’s hull before it, too, plunged into the mountains. A split second later the fuselage fractured along a line directly above my head, and the tail section fell away. Everyone sitting behind me was lost—the plane’s navigator, the flight steward, and the three boys playing cards. One of those boys was Guido.

  In that same instant, I felt myself lifted from my seat and hurled forward with indescribable force, as if some giant had scooped me up like a baseball and hurled me with all his might. I remember slamming into something, probably the bulkhead between the passenger cabin and the cockpit. I felt the wall flex, then I lost consciousness, and for me the crash was over. But the others still faced a terrifying ride as the fuselage, stripped of its wings, engines, and tail, sailed forward like an unguided missile. Here we were blessed with the first of many miracles. The plane did not wobble or spiral. Instead, whatever aerodynamic principles govern such things kept the remains of the Fairchild flying upright long enough to clear yet another black ridge. But the plane was losing momentum, and at last the nose dipped and it began to fall. Now the second miracle saved us, as the Fairchild’s angle of descent matched almost exactly the steep slope of the mountain onto which we were falling. If this angle had been just a few degrees steeper or shallower, the plane would have cartwheeled on the mountain and slammed to pieces. But instead it landed on its belly and began to rocket down the snow-covered mountainside like a toboggan. Passengers screamed and prayed out loud as the fuselage raced down the slope at a speed of two hundred miles per hour for a distance of more than four hundred yards, finding a fortunate path between the boulders and rocky outcrops that studded the mountain before slamming into a huge snow berm and coming to a sudden, violent stop. The forces of the collision were huge. The Fairchild’s nose was crumpled like a paper cup. In the passenger cabin, seats were ripped loose from the floor of the fuselage and hurled forward along with the people sitting in them, and dashed against the cockpit bulkhead. Several passengers were crushed instantly as the rows of seats closed on them like the folds of an accordion, then tumbled into a mangled heap that filled the front of the fuselage almost to the ceiling.

  Coche Inciarte, one of the team’s supporters, told me how he grasped the back of the seat in front of him as the plane streaked down the mountain, waiting to die at any second. After the impact, he said, the fuselage rolled slightly to the left, then settled heavily in the snow. For moments there was nothing but stunned silence, but soon the quiet was broken by soft moans, and then sharper cries of pain. Coche found himself lying in the tangle of seats, uninjured and amazed to be alive. There was blood everywhere, and the arms and legs of motionless bodies stuck out from under the compressed jumble of seats. In his confusion, his attention was drawn to his tie, which, he saw, had been shredded to threads by the force of the wind generated during the Fairchild’s wild slide down the mountain. Alvaro Mangino remembered being forced beneath the seat in front of him at the final impact. As he lay trapped on the floor, he heard moaning and crying all around him, and he especially remembered being baffled by the appearance of Roy Harley, who seemed to have turned bright blue. Later he would realize that Roy had been soaked in airplane fuel.

  Gustavo Zerbino was sitting next to Alvaro. He explained that in the first impact, when the plane hit the mountain ridge, he saw the seat in which Carlos Valeta was sitting rip loose from the floor and disappear into the sky. As the fuselage skidded down the slope, Gustavo stood and grabbed the luggage rack above his head. He closed his eyes and prayed. “Jesus, Jesus, I want to live!” he cried. He was certain he was about to die. Miraculously, he was still standing when the plane smashed into the snowbank and heaved to a sudden stop.

  So it’s true, he thought, you are still thinking after you are dead. Then he opened his eyes. When he saw the wreckage in front of him, he instinctively took a step backward, and immediately sank to his hips in snow. Looking up, he saw the ragged line of the fracture where the tail section had broken away from the fuselage, and he realized that everything and everyone behind him had disappeared. The floor of the fuselage was at the level of his chest now, and as he pulled himself back up into the plane, he was forced to climb over the motionless body of a middle-aged woman. Her face was bruised and covered with blood, but he recognized her as my mother. Gustavo, a first-year medical student, bent down and took her pulse, but she was already gone.

  Gustavo moved forward in the fuselage toward the pile of seats. He pried one of the seats from the pile and found Roberto Canessa underneath. Canessa, also a medical student, was not injured, and within moments Roberto and Gustavo began pulling more seats from the pile and tending, as well as they could, to the injured passengers they freed.

  At the same time, Marcelo Perez was pulling himself from the wreckage. Marcelo had hurt his side in the crash, and his face was bruised, but these injuries were minor, and as our longtime captain he immediately took control. His first action was to organize the uninjured boys and set them to work freeing the passengers who had been trapped under the heap of wrecked seats. This was laborious work. The force of the crash had crumpled the seats into an impossible tangle, with each seat interlocking with others in clusters too heavy to move. Many of the survivors were athletes, in top physical condition, but still, as they struggled to wrench and pry the seats apart; they found themselves gasping for breath in the thin mountain air.

  As passengers were pulled, one by one, from the wrecked seats, Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino assessed their condition, and did their best to tend to their injuries, some of which were grisly. Both of Arturo Nogueira’s legs had been broken in several places. Alvaro had a broken leg, and so did Pancho Delgado. A six-inch steel tube had impaled Enrique Platero’s stomach like the point of a spear, and when Zerbino yanked the tube from his friend’s gut, several inches of Platero’s intestines came out with it. The injury to Rafael Echavarren’s right leg was even more gruesome. His calf muscle had been ripped off the bone and twisted forward so that it hung in a slippery mass across his shin. When Zerbino found him Echavarren’s leg bone was completely exposed. Zerbino, swallowing his revulsion, grabbed the loose muscle, pressed it back in place, and then bandaged the bloody leg with strips of someone’s white shirt. He bandaged Platero’s stomach, too, and then the quiet, stoic Platero immediately went to work freeing others who were trapped in the seats.

  As more and more passengers were pulled from the wreckage, the “doctors” were amazed to see that most of the survivors had suffered only minor injuries. Canessa and Zerbino cleaned and bandaged their wounds. They sent others, with injuries to their arms and legs, out onto the glacier where they were able to dull their pain by cooling their limbs in the snow. Each uninjured survivor who was freed from the seats became another worker, and soon the workers had freed all of the trapped passengers except for one, a middle-aged woman named Señora Marinari. The señora was not traveling as part of our group. Instead, she was traveling to her daughter’s wedding in Chile, and had purchased tickets on this flight directly from the air force as an inexpensive way to make the trip. In the crash, her seat back had collapsed forward, pressing her chest forward against her knees and pinning her legs back beneath her seat. Other seats had fallen on top of her, burying her beneath a pile so heavy and wickedly tangled that no amount of effort could free her. Both of her legs were broken, and she was screaming in agony, but there was nothing anyone could do for her.

  And there was nothing to be done for Fernando Vasquez, one of the team’s supporters. When Roberto checked on him in the first moments after the crash, he seemed dazed but unharmed, and Roberto moved on. When Roberto checked again, he found Vasquez dead in his seat. His leg had been severed below the knee by the plane’s propeller when it slashed through t
he hull, and in the time Roberto was away from him, he had bled to death. Our team doctor, Francisco Nicola, and his wife, Esther, had been flung from their seats and were lying dead, side by side, at the front of the passenger cabin. Susy was lying beside my mother’s body. She was conscious but incoherent, with blood streaming over her face. Roberto wiped the blood from Susy’s eyes and saw that it was coming from a superficial scalp wound, but he suspected, correctly, that she had suffered much more serious internal injuries. A few feet away they found Panchito, bleeding from the head and rambling in semi-consciousness. Roberto knelt beside him and Panchito took Roberto’s hand, begging him not to leave. Roberto cleaned the blood from Panchito’s eyes, comforted him, then moved on. In the front of the plane he found me lying senseless, my face covered in blood and black bruises, my head already swollen to the size of a basketball. He checked my pulse and was surprised to see that my heart was still beating. But my injuries seemed so grave that he gave me no chance of surviving, so he and Zerbino moved on, saving their efforts for the ones they believed they could help.

  There were moans coming from the cockpit, but the cockpit door was still hopelessly barricaded by the wall of toppled seats, so Canessa and Zerbino had to step outside the fuselage and struggle through the deep snow to the front of the plane, where they were able to climb up through the luggage compartment and into the cockpit. There they found Ferradas and Lagurara still strapped in their seats. The plane’s final impact with the snowbank had crushed the Fairchild’s nose and forced the instrument panel into their chests, pinning them against the backs of their seats. Ferradas was dead. Lagurara was conscious, but gravely injured and in terrible pain. Canessa and Zerbino tried to pry the instrumental panel off the copilot’s chest, but it wouldn’t budge. “We passed Curicó,” Lagurara muttered, as the doctors tried to help him, “we passed Curicó.” Canessa and Zerbino managed to remove the cushion of his seatback, and this relieved some of the pressure on his chest, but there was not much more they could do for him. They fed him some snow to ease his thirst, then they asked if they could use the Fairchild’s radio. Lagurara told them how to set the dial for transmission, but when they tried to send a message, they found that the radio was dead. Lagurara begged for more snow, and the doctors fed it to him, then they turned to leave. As he realized the hopelessness of his situation, Lagurara pleaded with the boys to bring him the revolver he kept in his flight bag, but Canessa and Zerbino ignored him and headed back to the passenger cabin. As they climbed down from the cockpit, they heard Lagurara murmuring, “We passed Curicó, we passed Curicó… ”